Join Us For our Big Juneteenth Week of Service June 6-10

Calling all to our Juneteenth Big Mission Week June 6-10 How does this sound for a schedule below?

We can and will be flexible on alternatives and changes on the ground during the week especially in regards to weather. in general we will do outdoor stuff mornings and evenings some when coolest; inside stuff during afternoons. We will have a list of a variety of projects we will offer as opportunities to serve, that involve different skills and level and you can choose. Should have that list posted Monday.

Community Garden and Beautification projects will also include putting in a bed for the Sarah's Residential Living Center in our area, non profit care for seniors in a small home environment; and also planting the Mohammed Ali Peace Garden at our Center received from a grant. Others will be at ongoing sites such as the park where the orchard will go, at an intersection we have reclaimed, at an establish park partner, along the prairie trail, and other guerilla gardening sites at abandoned buildings.

We are non smoking non alcohol no weapons on property.

Big Mission Week Sunday, June 5, Arrival and Welcome 9 pm ish. We will welcome with orientation to the building,

Monday, June 6, Learning/Orientation To Area 9-3. Tour of our Service Area/Mission Field, from 46th to 76th N and Osage Line to Highway 75, discussion of history and current status of the area, issues of economic injustice, food justice, race, class, identifying assets and strengths of our community, and why we are where we are.

5:30 our weekly Bluegrass Jam at the Center

6-9 Pizza dinner and showing of Entertaining Angels movie and discussion of missional church. optional small projects at the Center.

Tuesday June 7 Morning Work at Welcome Table KitchenGardenPark, where orchard will also go.
Afternoon Work at Community Center. Evening Community Potluck and Game Night at the Center, Board Games, Wii, etc. continuing projects in evening as able.

Wednesday June 8
Morning Work at Guerilla Gardening and other blight to beauty Sites in the community.
11:30 am Kickoff of our Daily Summer Cafe feeding program for all in the area 18 and under at Cherokee School just a block away from the community center. Afternoon work at the Center.
Evening Worship 6:30 pm and Free Time in Tulsa area.

Let us know if you have special places you would like to go either this evening or possibly at other times.

Thursday June 9
Morning Work in community gardens, peace garden, etc. Trash Off Streets. Afternoon Work at.the Center.
Evening Orchard in Abandoned Places Miracle Among The Ruins Celebration Party at the KitchenGardenPark site, 6-8 pm. Celebrating our winning an orchard from the National Fruit Tree Foundation.

Friday June 10 Finishing Projects Day and celebrating the peace garden completion at the Center. Jupiter Jump for kids. Live music outdoors and inside in evening.

Sat. June 11. Goodbyes.
10 am cherokee school reunion planning meets
6 pm Gay Pride Entry downtown Tulsa 7:30 pm AA


Rev. Ron Robinson
Turley/North Tulsa OK
www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com
Www.missionalprogressives.blogspot.com
Www.turleyok.blogspot.com
Www.uuchristian.org
9186913223 9184301150

Tulsa World Article on Our Foundation/Center

The Tulsa World recently published an article on our new community center and our projects and our orchard vote competition, and more. Read it here: http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20110509_11_A13_CUTLIN403855&archive=yes

12 Facts of Hope in Turley/NorthTulsa

Hi all. Hope these 12 areas of making a difference in the world through small acts of justice done with great love will be as inspiring to you as they have been to me, and you will explore ways to partner with us to make even more of an impact here and in your own lives and groups and families.

1. We are currently in fourth place out of 120 in the national fruit tree orchard vote to win a 40 tree orchard for far northside Tulsa. Keep voting for us daily and spreading the news. If we can remain in the top five at the end of May we will win one of the orchards from the National Fruit Tree Foundation which will come plant, teach residents, install irrigation systems. Go to www.communitiestakeroot.com/Plant/Index/. Easy to register and vote. We have fliers and business cards about the contest if you would like to distribute them. Help us combat the food desert of our 74126 zip code.

2. This coming Monday, May 16, at 6:30 pm at our Welcome Table Community Center, 5920 N. Owasso Ave., we will be watching a special documentary being premiered on PBS marking the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders. Refreshments available. Bring friends to watch together. We are scheduling a whole series of films for the summer. We had a great cinco de mayo party watching the The Three Amigos and discussing the real roots of the Mexican celebration.

3. A story about our new center and the orchard and the new kitchengardenpark project, 6005 N. Johnstown Ave., ran today in the Tulsa World. You can read it and see the pictures at http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20110509_11_A13_CUTLIN403855. Share the link with others as a way to promote our orchard vote and renewal projects.

4. We are hosting a weekly bluegrass jam on Mondays at 5:30 pm at the Center. We have the neighborhood safety monthly meetings last Thursday of the month at 6:30 pm. The recovery groups meet Saturday evening. If you have an idea for a support group or regular community meeting let us know.

5. We do not have our community health clinic anymore, but the plans are evolving for a neighborhood or community health worker program in our underserved areas. I travelled with OU representatives to meet with officials at the Oklahoma Health Care Authority about the project, combining community residents and leaders with health providers and people in our neighborhoods who are repeat emergency room users. We are also working on a smaller wellness survey plan for this summer. Our Center's future Health Hub is taking shape.

6. A week ago the decision was made to close our partner in education Cherokee School. Since then we have been present with people in their grief and anger. We bought lunch for all the school teachers and staff last Friday to celebrate the ending of their testing period and to mourn the decision. We have met with parents who are exploring various options and are hoping to use our center and/or investigating charter schools or some other way to make use of the building. At the same time we will be hoping to receive invitations to partner more deeply with the remaining Tulsa public schools in our service area, and plan to help community residents have a voice in how such a vital physical building in our area will be taken care of and used for the good of the community as we meet with school officials. On Saturday May 21 we will be at Cherokee from 11 am to 3 pm for a Farewell Community Open House. Spread the word to all community residents and alumni of the school which dates back to its days before it was a Tulsa public school and was part of the Turley area school district drawing students from many miles around. You can of course read more about my comments to the School Board and others at www.turleyok.blogspot.com and also at www.cherokeeschoolgardenjournal.blogspot.com

7. We received the materials from the Mohammed Ali Peace Garden Grant we received that we had planned to put in at Cherokee with the students there, and now will be working with community children to plant the beds elsewhere in our area, perhaps our community center. We continued to plant and care for all the vegetables gardens and native plant landscape gardens that we started before the closing decision and will continue to grow food for families and our food pantry.

8. We have been notified that because of the school closing we will not be able to host there the daily summer feeding program we have coordinated and paid for the past few years for all under 18 years old. We will be trying to find an alternate site for it that is as convenient to our area children and youth and will report our progress. Next year we hope our center is capable of handling the program ourselves; we continue to have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinks for any who are hungry no matter what age. We are also working with O'Brien Recreation Center to get the word out to those over 60 in our area that they can be a part of a free nutrition program at the recreation center. We have also been working on the gardening projects at the recreation Center and helping to make the park again a place that is oriented to people in the immediate area and not just those from suburbs who come in for organized sports.

9. We presented 25 plus pages of signed petitions opposing the closing of the 74126 post office here on North Peoria when we met with representatives of the USPS and Sen. Inhofe's office at the post station. We told them it was immoral to close the facility in an area where the most vulnerable needed it without the means to take advantage of alternatives as those in areas of higher income do. We told them that if the internet is causing the post office problems the solution shouldn't be to close stations in areas where people have the least amount of email and internet use. We told them that the postal authorities have not put out any signage in the leased space they use or promotion that the post office is where it is and for all the new mobile residents in the area they don't know it exists, and worse have cut the hours down so that people who cant get away to use it from 10 am to 2 pm can't use it when they would otherwise. And at the same time we have begun talking and researching how we could set up a postal support center at our community center in case they go ahead and close down our post office. Come get more petitions to distribute to protest the possible closure.

10. We have work progressing on the Welcome Table KitchenGardenPark with the north area trees and debris scheduled to be removed this week so we can begin to plant garden beds and begin scheduling events and parties in the new northside park space, even as we keep working to clear and prepare and equip the rest of the miracle among the ruins greenspace project on the hill overlooking downtown Tulsa, a bridge between neighborhoods. We are scheduling a work day on the site, 6005 N. Johnstown Ave., for this Saturday May 14 at 10 am. Start spreading the word to folks you know or groups you know that they can adopt a bed to grow their own food we will help them plant. Also this Friday, March 13, from 2 to 5 pm we will be supporting the McLain High School Greenhouse Plant Sale, 4949 N. Peoria Ave. Come see the transformation underway and support the McLain Initiative.

11. We are going to be working with one of our partners in the area, Sarah's Residential Living on N. 53rd St. to plant a garden for their use and with their residents. We had also consulted with the Dept. of Human Services to help them launch a community garden at their office on North Peoria. And we have picked back up on our initial project we did with OU Tulsa graduate social work students, the abandoned properties project; we have been touring and planning ways to bring attention to the horrible unsafe conditons of commercial abandoned buildings on North Peoria in our area, and are planning guerilla gardening actions and BYOT events, bring your own tables,where we hold community potlucks on the grounds next to the abandoned by their owner properties, and plant sunflowers, and try to work with owners when we can locate them to clean up and/or tear down structures that endanger our children and send a message that our area isnt important.

12. We have the food pantry expansion underway; donations are being taken, and food being given away; we also have restarted our "gently used" clothing room, and we will be inheriting the childrens clothing room that was being operated at Cherokee School now that it is being shut. We have added a new computer to our computer center but need three or four more. We will be scheduling an auction of donated items to raise needed funds to continue the building renovation and the park creation. We are also planning to host mission trips from churches coming from Texas and would love to do so with others even from here in the Tulsa area. Summer calendar of events planning will be done soon with our leaders and will be listed in the next email news. At the worship gatherings on Sunday we are discussing this month the book "Change the World" by Michael Slaughter. http://www.amazon.com/Change-World-Recovering-Message-Mission/dp/1426702973 We combine mission service with conversation worship and common meal. More events on the church side will be planned and announced soon too.

For more go to www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com, www.missionalprogressives.blogspot.com,

Thanks, blessings

Radical Health Care Change For The Poor: The Turley Plan

Even when we had the OU clinic here in our community center in Turley/NorthTulsa, we were planning ways to be "disruptively innovative" about really making a difference in the lives of the poor and to cut the costs of health care too. Now that all the clinics that used to be called bedlam or mobile clinics have been shut down on the northside, we are focusing on our previous ideas and plans and dreams even more intensely. Since we first began to discuss this in Turley a few years ago we have found other approaches that are similar springing up in other parts of the nation.

Today I go with OU to Oklahoma City as we present our plan to state leaders where it is getting a favorable so far response. Here is a link to an article published last year that goes into the idea a little more: http://progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com/2010/08/disruptive-innovation-for-real.html

We put resources into people, leaders already, living in the neighborhoods where the ones live who are the highest repeat users of the emergency room as their only health home, and we start with the connections to community these people have, knowing that real health arises and is supported by community, and we train these people with whatever basic skills we need them to have to be "master patients" mentors to their neighbors, and also to be teachers to the medical residents who are overseeing the health care, teaching them about the real lives and real community hindrances and helps that these people face. Probably start with conditions like diabetes and breathing problems where monitoring and support can make huge difference.

The key is putting resources into the people who live in the neighborhoods with one another, instead of into the salaries of those who come into an area to treat people and then go back home with their money to other places; this then becomes an economic as well as health stimulus. We know that just because you build it, a clinic or anything, that they will not just automatically come. Not with generations of not seeing primary care as important, because you don't see yourself or your family as important; not when you don't trust medical personnel to understand your living conditions. So we need to turn inside out what we mean by a health home, to get it closer to real homes wherever those may be and however they are formed.

As soon as I can figure out how to upload here the newest powerpoint on the plan, I will do so because that helps you to see it a bit more clearer too.
Out of abandonment and desperation to change the statistics that people are dying fourteen years earlier here than just six miles south on Peoria Ave. has come a great idea.

Postal Authorities Considering Closing Turley Post Office, meeting with public Thursday May 5 from noon to 2 pm at the post office

We have petitions at the Center for people to sign protesting the looking into closing of turley post office and moving services to Apache Street Northside Station. We will present these at the thursday meeting at the post office.

We believe:
It is not right to close the post office in our area where we have the poor and the elderly without the means to get four miles away to the other post service; do it where this is possible,
It is not right where they are not the ones with computers and internet service as an alternative which is the reason the postal service says volume is down; do it where computers are prevalent,
It is not right because where volume is down here it is because the hours of service have been being cut over the years making it difficult to people to use the existing location,
It is not right because the people in this area do not have access or means to an alternative like fedex or ups offices as they do in other parts of the Tulsa area.

Let your federal official representatives know how you feel about this. Contact information through their websites Rep. John Sullivan http://sullivan.house.gov/Contact/, Senator Tom Coburn http://coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contactsenatorcoburn?p=ContactForm and Senator Jim Inhofe http://inhofe.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=contact.contactform and ask them to do the right thing and keep the post office open where it is needed the most, which is what government resources are meant to do, filling in the gaps.

Stay tuned for news of organizing and protesting meetings and exploring options.

Tulsa Schools Votes To Close Cherokee School

In a 5-2 vote, Cherokee School which was begun as Turley School in the early part of the twentieth century, was voted to be closed. Still to be determined are what the new boundaries will be covering the existing school boundaries, or what area schools will now cover this area; those are to be unveiled within a week or two. Also to be determined is what will be done with the building and the lands. We will keep you posted. We encourage you email board3@tulsaschools.org, Dr. Lana Turner-Addison, school board representative for our area who voted to close the school as part of the project schoolhouse initiative, to say that the community needs to be involved in what happens to the property; also send your emails to ballake@tulsaschools.org and to state representative Seneca Scott at seneca.scott@okhouse.gov who has been working to keep the school open. Our best option now is to make sure the building is used by a community oriented group. Also email support to Principal Jody Tell at telljo@tulsaschools.org.

Here are my remarks to the School Board before the vote was taken:

I am Ron Robinson, a district resident and graduate of Cherokee, Monroe, and McLain, and with A Third Place Community Foundation, an active partner in education with Cherokee School in many ways through school programming, outdoor classrooms, gardens and landscaping and running the summer food program at the school for all of the community all summer long, and I am on the board of the new McLain School Foundation.

There is much hope and promise in the Project Schoolhouse initiative, especially for us in north Tulsa. Still it is with sadness and regret that I speak tonight because of lost opportunities to make the plan even better for an area that needs the best, and of course with a little sense of outrage that public schools have received this kind of treatment from state political leaders. We need to take this energy and be in oklahoma city.

But First,our Cherokee school and parent and community leaders still simply want to know specifically why, why Cherokee was closed compared to other schools in our immediate area based on the measurement criteria used which to all our eyes didn’t seem justified in comparison? And why no one met with Cherokee to go over the alternative proposals we made which we feel would be ways to improve not only Cherokee but building on its strengths to help McLain, our neighbor on North Peoria a mile away.

Why have three schools serving children under sixth grade within a half mile of each other on North Cincinnati; why not take any one of those programs and move it one mile east to North Peoria to Cherokee? Why reopen Monroe for an immersion program when you could move it one mile north to already existing Cherokee?

Second, why at this date, at this point in the project, are people from the principal to teachers to parents and community leaders still asking these questions? This is perhaps the biggest question with the longest lasting effects for building any bridges with those affected at Cherokee, for keeping them connected with the local public school system and trying to keep them in our neighborhoods that have received so much historic and continuing neglect and abandonment by all institutions.

Lastly, we are concerned with what might happen next and how the community is treated as part of any closure and the future of the land use. Cherokee School is unique. It was not created by Tulsa Public School. It was given to TPS by the Turley area community when it closed its own school district. The historic arch of Turley High School is on the grounds, as is part of the Turley Historical Display, and the trees and gardens have been planted there by the community residents which now includes those from both incorporated city of Tulsa neighborhoods and unincorporated community of Turley neighborhoods.

We hope for the best for the initiative. We hope that in the future you will find our community’s school buildings and grounds to be of use some way for the education of our children and the growing of healthy community. We have so very very very few community assets left in our part of the 74126 zipcode; but one of our assets, the main one, is a people who are proud to live where we live, in a naturally multiethnic diverse community, and to help one another make our area one with deeper community ties, the ties that are the real source of the good life.

And so we end by inviting you, TPS, to come back to our community, to find ways to partner with us, not just for our sake, but for your sake, for your growth and improvement, and for the benefit of the lives of the children and youth we all serve.

We are still waiting to find out why.